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gsnoorky, can you be a bit more specific about which driver you are talking about ? When you say "the plain driver" or "the standard driver" are you talking about the open source drivers (if so which ones ?) or about the proprietary driver installed then used without running aticonfig ?

The aticonfig utility won't do anything for the open source drivers (in fact any remnants of the proprietary driver will stop the open source driver from working properly), but the installation instructions *require* the use of aticonfig before running the proprietary driver (aticonfig --initial with options for specific configurations, eg dual-head etc..).

I suspect that part of the friction here is coming from other posters not really understanding what you are trying to say, and I suspect being more specific about the drivers would help. Talking about "standard" and "plain" is pretty ambiguous.

Isn't the Cyberlink software all userspace ? The pushback against proprietary code is for the kernel, not for userspace code AFAIK.

Enterprise distro vendors, at least the ones catering to 3D workstation customers, generally do wait until binary drivers are ready and work directly with hardware vendors to make sure the schedules line up. That doesn't work well for "rolling release" distros, however, or for distros which focus on bringing the newest and niftiest code to their users.

Bravo!: Thank you! I think that I explain how I understand the ATi drivers in my last post to Ad____. You're right, I wasn't specific enough about the terminology--after all, with the Klingons pummeling my ship, my head's metal plate became loose!

As for Cyberlink--you're right--and, they're not the first vendor to do this, I do remember a company selling Linux drivers for "paperweight" printers several years ago. The Cyberlink programs for Linux are somewhat different--they use proprietary codecs. (Unfortunately, Ogg/Theora and many others haven't gone over with the public as well as many of us had hoped.) Cyberlink, as well as ATi and nVidia, certainly won't provide source code. The codecs are more important to the community than particular printer drivers. In a sense, they're just below the importance of workable video drivers to most users in the community....

You're last point is key: What good is "whiz bang" if you can't see it?! Nonetheless, as mentioned before yesterday, I did get the driver to work after all with setting manipulation. I suppose my (reconstituted) point is that it may prove to be a good idea in the future for "rolling" releases to be handled more as the Enterprise releases you mention are handled. That's all!

As I mentioned to Ad____, given adoption of the new replacement firmware for the BIOS being considered by mainboard mfrs., our points may prove "moot."

I'm sorry to all that I didn't form my complaint more clearly and with more sensitivity. It shouldn't have come out as a strong attack against the great Linux developers, although it did. I apologize to them and to all whom I have offended here. I think my point finally is clarified--thanks in good part to bridgman. I'm moving on!

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hy⋅poc⋅ri⋅sy
/hɪˈpɒkrəsi/ [hi-pok-ruh-see]
?noun, plural -sies.
1. The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
2. The practice of professing standards, beliefs, etc., contrary to one's real character or actual behaviour, esp the pretence of virtue and piety.

Synonyms:
1. See deceit.

Thesaurus

1. hypocrisy - an expression of agreement that is not supported by real conviction
lip service, dissembling, feigning, pretense, pretence - pretending with intention to deceive

2. hypocrisy - insincerity by virtue of pretending to have qualities or beliefs that you do not really have
insincerity, falseness, hollowness - the quality of not being open or truthful; deceitful or hypocritical
sanctimoniousness, sanctimony - the quality of being hypocritically devout
smarminess, unctuousness, unction, fulsomeness, oiliness, oleaginousness - smug self-serving earnestness

* * *

So, somebody comes ranting about fglrx being a hassle to install, the OSS driver being "clumsy, stupid, and laughable", and complaining about distros not making sure the propietary drivers work in their releases.

To this, some pointed out that there is nothing OSS developers could or should do about closed drivers, for reasons x, y and z. Others asked for more information to find out what was wrong. Nobody took issue with his driver problems. Nobody, except you. "You are doing something wrong" and "here it works perfectly" is the typical bullshit that l33t linux imbeciles throw at people complaining about real problems with their machines. This case is particularly funny because you know full well what to expect from the OSS driver, running QuakeLive at 2 FPS until recently. Yet you have the courage of acting surprised and claim to "have absolutely no idea what [he's] talking about".

You choose, hypocrite or amnesic?

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mm. about the standard radeon driver, i just installed ubuntu 9.10 on an old computer we had lying around at work with some on-board ati 3200 or worse graphics. everything worked automatically. it detected the monitor resolution (2048x1152 or something equally odd) and used it, something the closed source drivers under windows and linux had refused to do, and 3d acceleration for the desktop was also enabled and worked fine. for this computer, the standard kernel driver was better than the closed source one, and that's how it should be.

so well done amd. by releasing documentation for their graphics chips and putting developers on the project of writing a free driver, they have made it possible for the first time in years to have 3d acceleration on a modern graphics card using purely free software. i do feel quite vindicated for getting my boss to only buy computers with cpus and graphics cards from amd.

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I use the open source driver on a HD 4550 and I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

You're doing something terribly wrong.

Linus and the rest of his rant doesn't have anything to do with the part you were replying to. If you use the OSS driver and have absolutely no idea about what he is saying, you are implying that the driver works perfectly for you, to the point that you can not even conceive what he is talking about. Not only that, but given that what is true for you must be true for the rest, the only explanation is that this user is doing something terribly wrong. That's bad enough. However, you did positively know that the OSS driver is under development right now and that you only get certain features or basic support for newer cards by grabbing the latest bits from source. That didn't stop you playing the surprised guy who can't understand how on earth is it possible that it doesn't work for other users. And that's hypocrisy. If you can't see it after reading a couple of times the definition you may want to ask the money back from your secondary school.

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I was surprised that he couldn't get any resolution other than 640x480 using the free driver. Because this is a very rare condition, and one that has been fixed in git a long time ago. So he was doing something wrong

I wasn't surprised that he wasn't playing QuakeLive or Unigine Heaven on it.

There was a huge leap you made there with your knee jerk reaction, and your attempts to rationalise your way out of it are entertaining. Keep them up

I still never professed to hold a belief that I didn't, nor did I expect him to do anything that I'm not willing to do myself. In fact, I expected him to do the exact same thing I am doing -- get the latest driver and show appreciation for the open source developers.

Insulting my education won't make you understand that word better

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Your efforts to justify yourself, now just limited to the resolution problem (glad to see you backing down), demonstrate that you perfectly understand what hypocrite means and why I'm calling you so. But you keep failing, unless you honestly find astonishing that somebody may have this sort of issues with a modern card, running a yet-to-be-finished driver that, in your own experience, couldn't handle a 10 years old game engine. Your implicit admission of actually knowing about resolution problems with the driver doesn't score you points though.

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Your efforts to justify yourself, now just limited to the resolution problem (glad to see you backing down), demonstrate that you perfectly understand what hypocrite means and why I'm calling you so. But you keep failing, unless you honestly find astonishing that somebody may have this sort of issues with a modern card, running a yet-to-be-finished driver that, in your own experience, couldn't handle a 10 years old game engine. Your implicit admission of actually knowing about resolution problems with the driver doesn't score you points though.

And STILL none of this would make me a hypocrite

QuakeLive was released in 2009 and uses an upgraded engine, BTW. It's exactly this upgrade that made it slow. The 10-year old Quake3 engine was one of the first things that worked on the free driver.

But the fact that you don't know this doesn't make you a hypocrite. It simply makes you ignorant